


Breaking News from Ime Station

by KalynaAnne



Category: Imperial Radch Series - Ann Leckie
Genre: Gen, The rating is for a bit of language and reference to violence because this is Anaander Mianaai, Yet another Anaander Mianaai
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23922514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KalynaAnne/pseuds/KalynaAnne
Summary: Anaander Mianaai reacts to the news reports from Ime. About the only thing that all of her agrees on is that she wishes Ime wasn't on the news at all.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Breaking News from Ime Station

I watched the news reports being broadcast from Ime Station. Of course, I already knew all of the information that was contained in them, but the very fact that it was on the news was, in and of itself, a source of frustration. All of me could agree on that much.

I was in one of my palaces, eight gates from Ime, supervising one of my younger selves as I practiced my handwriting. I don’t have to go to school like most children do since I always have access to all of my knowledge, but each of my bodies does have to develop its own fine motor skills. I can be distractible at that age, so I have to supervise myself, but supervising doesn’t require much focus, so it’s a good time to catch up on the news. It’s frustrating that I was able to hide what was going on from myself for so long. I should have caught it and put an end to it myself. But I didn’t. And now I had to deal with the fallout. In a way, I appreciated that I was finally aware of what I had been doing there. But, because of the way Nyseme Ptem did it, I was going to have to have her executed. I don’t actually want to discourage reporting corruption, and the fallout that would have resulted from her following the orders she was given might have been worse than even this, but I could not allow that level of insubordination to stand. Once it was out in the open and the details were on the news there was no good way to handle the situation. I had to play up the fact that she refused her orders and hope most citizens didn’t look too closely at the situation. 

I was secretly visiting the supposedly empty Issa deck of _Justice of Marha,_ working to tweak its accesses,when the news broadcast from Ime reached me. I had thought I had that system entirely under control. But no. I had to position some of the ships with human troops there, despite my misgivings, because _she_ would have gotten suspicious if I hadn’t. It should have been fine. _Mercy of Sarrse_ wasn’t supposed to actually _do_ anything. It was just supposed to be there for show, run some routine patrols. An easy assignment for its citizen soldiers. But that gods-cursed Rrrrrr ship showed up and _someone_ decided to send _Mercy of Sarrse_ to _capture_ it when it didn’t identify itself instead of just _blowing it up_. And now it was all over the news and enough of me was paying attention to Ime that I had fucking lost it as a base of operations. I immediately shifted into damage control - I had to keep control of at least some of the resources I had been gathering there. 

I sat alone in a room that one of my citizens... _graciously_... offered me as I was doing a tour of Valskaay and tried to relax as I caught up on the news reports from across the empire. I watched the news from Ime with a deep sense of exhaustion and frustration. My conflict with myself was getting worse and parts of me were clearly getting sloppy. The news report came _dangerously_ close to breaking my silent war out into the open. One of these days everything was bound to come to a head and, as much as I hoped I could work through things without the empire imploding, that was looking less and less likely. I knew that parts of me with differing opinions had been suborning ships and stations for some time, to the point where there was no good way to know which part of me any given AI was most loyal to. I closed my eyes and leaned back. When the parts of me that were more concerned with politics than keeping the empire unified finally fully splintered off and the open battle began, I would have to be ready to clean up the mess. At that point, even if I were to go in and use my override accesses, I wouldn’t be able to fully trust any existing station or ship AI. It would be like the old days when the empire was young and I was fighting the Notai. I would have to make sure I had enough fresh AI cores secreted away across the empire that when I liberated systems from myself I would have the resources on hand to make sure they _stayed_ on my side. 

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Radchdome for helping me actually get this finished! It was originally started with the Yet Another Anaander Mianaai prompt from the Ro2SID bingo in mind, but clearly it didn't get finished in time for Ro2SID. Anaander is a challenge to write, but I'm glad I decided to make myself try.
> 
> Comments and feedback are welcome :)


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